13: Gently Down the Stream of Consciousness
1. My two favorite words heard recently are brouhaha and jalopy.
2. I keep getting the Jubilee and the Jamboree mixed up. We have both in Floyd now.
3. I’ve been calling the Station, the newly renovated old building in town with apartments upstairs, the Dakota of Floyd.

4. While shopping this week I saw a bright gold bra with a smiley face on one of the cups.
5. My first trip to the Country Club pool resulted in some pictures of the tadpoles (a pre-beginner swim class), at least 13 of them.

6. Learn why I have a brand new pink blow up raft not yet out of the package HERE.
7. I bought four new cushion lawn chairs that unfortunately required some assembly but when we opened the box to put them together, we discovered there were no screws, bringing a whole new meaning to “we were screwed!”
8. I just got a message from the little voice within that my rice cooking on the stove is burning. Be right back.
9. The rice was stuck to the bottom of the pan but still eatable.
10. Speaking of pan, I was recently asked in a meme that I didn’t finish to name a fictitious character who made a lasting impression and my answer was Peter Pan.
11. Because I grew up on a tiny peninsula in between Boston and Cape Cod, I’m fortunate that I can visit my family and have a beach vacation at the same time.
12. Whenever I say Cape Cod, I think about when I was a young girl picking wild blueberries there with my grandmother, which leads to remembering a poem I wrote about baking a birthday blueberry pie for my son Josh … I feel my grandmother's wildness in me … navigating rough edges of coastline … as I steer the rolling pin like an oar … like an antique relic from her "roaring 20s" … it rocks back and forth … And especially this stanza: As I search the bowl of blueberries … for the bluest black ones … I remember 4 and 20 … blackbirds baked in a pie … and my son arranging battles … between blueberries and grapes … The blueberries always lost because he ate them …
13. I just this second remembered that Josh’s birthday is on July 10 and I may be away for his birthday, so now I’m going downstairs to find a card to send him.
More Thirteen Thursday fun HERE.
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1. A couple of times this month when I was reading my blog comments I thought that my friend June from
1. I sent Mara and Kyla home with a bag full of garden lettuce when they were here playing
1. Yesterday’s writer’s cramp is today’s carpal tunnel.
1. A mother phoebe with a nest in the porch rafters has been using our picnic table for her runway while making feeding trips to her babies, as evidenced by the bird droppings I have to clean up everyday.
1. I check for blossoms on my flowers with the same vigilance that I check for blog comments.
1. Does Shebang mean the same thing as a kit and caboodle?
1. A year or so ago I would never have guessed that I’d be interviewing and writing about an opera singer, a cheesemaker, a
1. Last month I reported being on the gum diet, how I picked up an old habit of chewing and snapping and getting a general jaw workout whenever I felt snacking.
1. After 183
1. Earth Day in Floyd has a blog. Read all about it
1. I have never typed LOL (except for just now), but did type LMAO once. It was when I wrote that talk show host Bonnie Hunt had a 13 on her coffee cup and my sister Sherry told me in a comment that it was really a B for her name.
1. I just got asked to a do a writing assignment via a Facebook Instant message.
1. This is my 180th Thirteen Thursday, so last week when I posted my 179th on Wednesday thinking it was Thursday, I blamed it on old age.
1. In addition to Floyd’s
1. Snow looks out of place on a sandy beach and some sand on beaches
He died in the afternoon but continued to move around and seem alive. We were told that it was just a reflex reaction, and even though he was supposedly dead we didn’t want to leave him while he was still acting alive. In real life we left my brother’s body too soon after he passed. He was technically dead buy I knew more was still going on.
1. Last week my cursor starting typing everything backwards – from right to left. It felt like driving a car around that would only go in reverse.
1. Today while grocery shopping I learned for the first time what a BOGO Sale was.
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1. I woke up early for the drive to Roanoke to baby-sit
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1. The 2009 
1. For me, reading and writing are so intertwined that I can’t read a book without a pen in hand to mark the lines I like, and I can’t write without reading each line out loud to hear how they sound. 













1. I played
1. My blog is like the economy. It seems to be in a recession. Visits and comments, like retail sales, are down from last year.
1. Click
1. Who let the air out of Christmas? Driving to Christiansburg on Monday I passed a yard full of plastic blow-up Christmas ornaments deflated and spread out on the law. It looked like a Christmas massacre.
1. I used to sign my kid's Christmas presents SANTA and change my handwriting so they wouldn’t guess it was me. When they got older I signed them SANTA MARIA just for the fun of it.
1. I know a young girl whose middle name is Lavender. If you were going to name a baby after an herb, flower, or spice, which would you choose?
1. When I posed the idea of writing a story on the new Floyd-based
1. Why did my sister Trish Bowen, who I think looks like Meg Ryan, model a T-shirt on Fox News on her birthday? See the video clip answer

1. Me on the phone with my son Dylan, father of 6 month old Bryce: “After a couple of weeks I can’t stop thinking about Bryce, and I need to see him.” Dylan: “I know. That happens to me everyday at work.” 
1. I drove over the remains of a smashed pumpkin on the way to town the other day. Getting smashed in the road is not a completely uncommon way for a pumpkin to meet its end, as opposed to
1. My friend
1. Fellow poet, Scrabble player and
1. Everyone knows that Poets are born and not made in school. This is true also of painters, sculptors, and musicians. Something that is essential can’t be taught; it can only be given, earned, or formulated in a manner to mysterious to be picked apart and redesigned for the next person. ~ So says Mary Oliver in the beginning paragraph of her book, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry.
1. Our dog
1. This is the time of year I like to sunbathe on the porch because it’s cool enough to soak it up. Letting all that good warmth and Vitamin D penetrate my skin makes me feel like a solar voltaic panel storing sun for the winter.
1. This is the time of year when I put on socks, and the butter in the butter dish is no longer the consistency of mayonnaise.
1. I like PBS’s Shields and Brooks but David Byrne is my favorite Talking Head. He has a blog too.
I decided I wanted to have more fun with writing, so I drew on my Irish storytelling heritage, posted the above bio photo of me in Ireland with a shamrock pinned to my sweater, and let the gift of gab begin.
1. I like to keep at least one toy in my pocketbook. For some reason it makes me feel prepared.
1. I watched PBS's full coverage of the Democratic National Convention like others watched the Olympics (which I didn’t).
1. When it comes to the school of life I don’t do a lot of homework but I pay attention in class.
1. In a pinch when I’m at the beach without a notebook, I can write in the margins of a clam box menu using my flip flop sandal for a desk.
1. The night after my fisherman brother
1. You know you’re having a hometown vacation when you’re riding your mother’s neighbor’s bike and someone stops you on the street to ask where the library is and you actually know. 
1. I like to type “okeedoke” instead of “yes” just to piss off my spell checker.
1. The
1. My new line as of late is: “I’ll bring the cucumbers!” They grow overnight.
1. On the Fourth of July, I made a red, white, and blue dessert for my house guest: strawberries, blueberries, and whipped cream!
1. You know when you forget someone’s name and no matter how hard you try, even if it’s on the tip of your tongue, you can’t remember. Then you go off and do something else and the name just pops in your head? Writing poetry is like that.
1. Hung-over with fun from 
1. Blogging helps me know what day it is, which I wouldn’t know otherwise because I don’t have a regular job, and I especially don’t know when I’m at the beach, which I am now. 
1. I’ve never been very sports-minded. It’s taken
1. Printer’s ink is to a writer what gas is to a trucker. And it costs almost as much.
1. I find myself going to my own blog just to look at photos of my
1. The moon is poetry to the sun’s prose, shining indirectly but penetrating deeply.
1. I was recently typing the name of my book of poems,
1. New motto for my overbooked husband: "No" is a complete sentence.
There’s also a song about them
1. Black tea is like whiskey to herb tea’s wine.
1. Tongue twister created after I played AI (a three legged sloth) twice in one Scrabble play, which caused
1. Seeing poets Bruce Weigl and Claudia Emerson together at the
1. On April fool’s day I wrote this fake news story: A fool resembling Donald Trump announced on April 1st that Thursday had been fired. People in board rooms across America were stunned at the turn of events and feared the lost revenue that would ensue. CEOs scrambled to book Friday, which overflowed into Saturday, and bloggers who play Thirteen Thursday didn’t know what to do with themselves.
1. Have you ever thought of getting a “13” tattoo, taking a picture of it and using it for a Thirteen Thursday header?
1. Said to my friend Rosemary at
1. I’ve come to accept that I’m never going to remember how to spell words like Renaissance and restaurant on my own, no matter how many times I write or type them.
1. Look what was right under my nose. After seeing a yard full of plastic lawn flamingo and going back later to get a picture but finding they were gone, the following day I went to play scrabble and found these in the Cafe Del Sol window box doing
1. I was recently
1. Valentine’s Day Morning: He replaced the belt on the vacuum cleaner for me. I left him a pink valentine bag on the kitchen table the night before with a card and a Sunkist naval orange inside. He responded by leaving me a conversation candy heart that said, “Call Me.”
1. A haiku a day keeps the “roses are red violets are blue” blues away.
1. I’ve been pruning little tea poems … origami notes … petals of the Orient …light enough to float.
1. Haiku is the bonsai of poetry.
1. Overnight my hair reaches critical mass and I can’t go another day without a haircut.
1. We didn’t wear tie dye in the 60’s. Paisley, Nehru jackets, Mexican ponchos, bell bottoms, beads, big floppy hats, and batik prints, yes; but not tie dye.
1. I just recently figured out – while dressing in front of the woodstove on a frigid morning – why the character in “Twas the Night before Christmas” slept with a cap on. He was cold.
1. We hadn’t recovered from our rowdy community Thanksgiving game of
1. My youngest son
1. I have a fantasy poetry troupe called The Beat Mix, a play on the word beatniks.
“I don’t know, but I hope it doesn’t mean something like X-husband.” Of course, I was googling X-mas as soon as I could get my hands on a computer and
1. What’s up with hunters that wear camouflage clothes, topped off with a bright blaze orange hat? Do they want to be seen or not?
1. My hands slipped while writing an email to my blog friend and fellow poet,
1. Well, you must tell me, baby … How your head feels under somethin' like that … Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat … Well, you look so pretty in it … Honey, can I jump on it sometime? … Yes, I just wanna see … If it's really that expensive kind … You know it balances on your head … Just like a mattress balances … On a bottle of wine … Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat … ~ Bob Dylan
1. I used to keep a journal just for writing what I was thankful for. This is an entry written on the fall Equinox of 1998: I looked at the trees upside down. I looked at a horse close-up. I saw the moon misshapen, jumped on the trampoline, and watched a star bounce in and out of a tree branch. I lit a candle and watched it flicker. I longed for pansies and writing letters. I helped Dylan do his homework.
1. The Grief Bond: The last time I played Scrabble with 
1. Talking to my blog friend
1. When something exciting happens and Joe hears me say, “Now that’s something to write home about!” he knows it means I’m going to blog about it. 
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